Barcelona’s crackdown on overtourism, begun in 2024 amid protests by residents concerned about rising housing prices and other impacts of tourist visitation, has picked up momentum heading into the summer of 2026.
Overall, the plan is to reduce the number of leisure tourists to Barcelona — currently estimated to be about 65 percent of the total — to roughly equal the number of cultural and business visitors, respectively. In 2024, about 24 million people visited Barcelona, which has a population of under 2 million in its city center.
Tourist Taxes Rise as City Tightens Controls
Along those lines, Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni is looking to increase the city’s tourist tax on cruise visitors from about $4.65 per person on overnight docking to about $9.30. In April 2026, the city raised its hotel tax to between $10-17 per night, and its nightly tax on vacation rentals to about $14 per night — both among the highest in Europe.
Collboni said the higher cruise tax is intended to discourage cruise visitors, and that his ultimate aim is to eliminate stopover cruise visits to Barcelona. Already approved: a plan to reduce the number of cruise terminals in the city from seven to five.
“We’ve reached the end of the road, Barcelona has reached the maximum number of tourists it can accommodate,” Jose Antonio Donaire, the city’s first Commissioner for Sustainable Tourism, told The Guardian. “We don’t want more tourists, not even one more, but we need to manage those we have.”
Short-Term Rentals Face Major Phase-Out by 2028
Perhaps the most significant change being planned is an effective end to short-term tourist rentals. As of 2028, more than 10,000 permits to operate Airbnb-type property rentals in the city will be revoked. (A moratorium on new hotel construction in Barcelona’s city center has also been in effect since 2017.)
City officials also want to return La Boqueria, Barcelona’s traditional food market, to its original character. Dating back to the 13th century, the market off La Rambla has long been where residents went to buy fresh produce and meat, but has increasingly been encroached on by vendors selling fast food to tourists. Organized pub crawls are among the specific types of activities city officials plan to ban.
The market and La Rambla are just some of the areas of Barcelona that locals say have been overrun by tourists, crowding residents out. In response, the city is developing a plan to disperse visitors away from these areas, the Gothic Quarter and the Sagrada Familia, to other, less-traveled parts of the historic city.
On the fiscal side, Barcelona’s tourist tax will no longer be used only to support tourism promotion, but also to support local businesses and promote livability in the city, officials said.
